Namecheap Review: The Best Affordable Hosting Provider in 2024

Introduction to Namecheap review

Namecheap is a leading domain registrar and web hosting provider that is affordable, user-friendly, and secure end-to-end. It caters to a broad clientele base—be it beginners or pros in the market—with domain registration, web hosting, and a website builder among its products and services.

In this review, I will address the pros and cons of Namecheap review, pricing versus others, and talk about the plans offered. I’ll also cover how easy it is to use their hosting management and performance metrics such as speed and uptime. In addition, with the research team, we also weighed in on the security measures, closely examined its domain services, and made a general review of the control panel. Toward the end, we present our final verdict and answer some common questions.

Review of Namecheap Hosting: Overview

Namecheap review is a well-known name in areas like domain registration services, and it provides a couple of hosting services that range from shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, to reseller hosting. Namecheap hosting would be an optimal solution for any person or small business needing an inexpensive but strong and at the same time user-friendly solution for hosting their web page. In cases of more demanding demands in terms of hosting, such as high-traffic websites, large e-commerce platforms, or enterprise-level operations, this might not be enough.

⭐ Rating:	3.6★★★★☆
💵 Price:	From $1.58/month
📑 Uptime guarantee:	100%
⚙️ Hosting types:	Shared, WordPress, VPS, reseller, and dedicated hosting
🌎 Server locations:	The US, the UK, and EU
👨‍💻 24/7 live support:	Yes
🔥 Coupons:	Namecheap coupon 70% OFF

Pros & Cons of Namecheap

Things which we like: Things we dislike:

Namecheap price

Namecheap is amongst the most cost-effective hosting providers. It all begins with a shared hosting plan costing $1.58 a month. In contrast, Bluehost offers shared hosting plans starting at $1.99 a month, while HostGator offers $3.75 a month for starting shared hosting.

However, with Namecheap review, it starts at $6.88 per month, which is a whole lot higher than IONOS’ starting offer of $1.00/ monthly.

Hosting type	Best for
Shared hosting	In case you’re curious, it is a great deal for first-timers: Get Namecheap, 70% OFF ,
WordPress hosting	Low-cost web hosting solution for WordPress users.
VPS hosting	Mid-range businesses or online businesses. A sort of middle-of-the-road option.
Reseller hosting	Awesome for Web Developers /Web Development Companies.
Dedicated hosting	For large sites and stores online, an advanced solution offers you an independently dedicated server.

For large sites and stores online, an advanced solution offers you an independently dedicated server.

The good news is that the provider offers many options and all are quite reasonably priced. In this overview, we are going to put our attention on shared hosting; it’s usually most in demand among ordinary people.

With shared hosting, they contain three plans Namecheap inclusive of free domain registration and privacy protection, unmetered bandwidth, absolutely free website builder access, and free SSL certificate.

Surely, of course, these plans contrast in many things:

Great;

	Stellar	Stellar Plus	Stellar Business
price	$1.58/month	$2.28/month	$4.48/month
Websites	3	Unlimited	Unlimited
Storage	20 GB SSD	Unlimited	50GB SSD
Email accounts	Free (up to 30 accounts)	Unlimited	Unlimited
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Hosted domains	3	Unlimited	Unlimited
Backups	2 times/week (without auto backups)	2 times/week and auto-backup	2 times/week and auto-backup
cPanel	✅	✅	✅
Website builder	✅	✅	✅

All the Namecheap plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you don’t have to make an immediate commitment for the longest term. Here is all you need to learn before purchasing a Namecheap subscription:

A 30-days money guarantee is assured.

Take into account there are no refunds if you pay with cryptocurrency.

The standard price is deducted to the amount if refunding is made on the subscription applied to the free domain name you got.

Only one refund would be permitted on services.

The first payment is very nicely priced, much better than the renewal price. But that’s nothing unusual; in fact, that is one of the minor rates that we have seen.

Check what kind of Namecheap promo codes are available—to offer the best price!

In general, Namecheap review lives up to its name for the purpose of cheap. Prices are of course under 2 dollars in order to be the cheapest and have a 30-day decision whether a service is for you. 

How easy is Namecheap hosting management?

Namecheap review makes everything automated and straightforward. It is easy to handle, making it smooth for the domain registration functionality that it has. It uses a combination of both the native management panel and cPanel, which is a very common mix these days. Both are quite intuitive and functional, so you won’t have any trouble discarding it at first.

Begin with Namecheap:

Namecheap’ s review native dashboard is quite simple; it has everything that might be needed. In general, it is like a navigator to get to cPanel or your own domain management tools. Additionally, that is where one may contact support.

This is the dashboard from where you can manage your list of domains, hosting, emails, and other tools or applications. For simplicity—it’s just that I found everything perfectly aligned with the left side navigation bar.

Anyway, I also liked the fact that Namecheap review offers the free migration service, within which there is the guarantee of migration of your website per 1 day with less than 15 minutes of downtime.

If they fail to meet this guarantee, according to their website, they will credit your account with the value of your first purchase of shared hosting with Namecheap, or if you were just so dissatisfied with how your migration was handled. Take note that this is not applicable for promo packages.

Namecheap Control Panel Review

Namecheap uses the usual cPanel. No tweaks, no flashy skins, no nothing. It’s just like a naked cPanel. But the common knowledge is that even without the flashy skins, cPanel is no rocket science to use. You basically need no Codex to decipher cPanel whether you are an experienced user or a beginner.

As the cPanel is well organized, all the most required settings can easily be found.

So, what will you cPanel into doing?

WordPress installation. The most standard app installer Namecheap offers is Softaculous Un Cover all of your Softaculous setups for your cPanel’s floor, while in the type Software.

Activating SSL certificate. One could additionally get a standalone tool from Namecheap known as Namecheap SSL. However, this did not work for us, so we ended up contacting their customer support service in the end.

Setting up a professional email address. You would need to navigate to the Email category and then the Email Accounts module before you begin. That is it – it is very easy, but this type of email service can really only handle a few dozen outgoing emails before you start running the risk of being labeled as a spammer You are sharing the server reputation for the email of the entire ‘neighbourhood’ on which your site resides – it doesn’t take many spam reports to get the whole IP suspended.

When it comes to floater work hosting with the database manager and file manager fetching to installing subdomains or literally anything else needed.

I liked that it is very organized, and everything is to be found on the main window. On a bitter note, however, we have come across better user-friendly cPanel alternatives, such as this one offered by Hostinger: 

hPanel, probably more fitting for the first-time hosting user. This, of course, differs because in Hostinger’s panel, there exist explanations or recommendations under most of the buttons or sections, which actually makes the learning process effortless.

Website builder by Namecheap

For whichever hosting plan you purchase, Namecheap provides you with a drag-and-drop website builder. So, you will be able to host the site and build it with just one subscription.

You really can’t expect highly modern designs starting from templates. Except for over than 200 templates for various niches and topics, everything else lacks originality and isn’t going to make your site stand out.

Meanwhile, the editor works just alike a drag and drops. You can add in many widgets from image galleries, through to a blog, forms, payment buttons, and more. However, the editor can be very restricting, so design flexibility won’t be much.

In this perspective, the editor is quite functional and easy to use, although it is rather old school. Hostinger website builder permits a great deal of flexibility and has over 150 professionally designed templates. Now, if you want a powerful and up-to-date website builder, you might want to consider taking a look at some Hostinger plans. Aside from WordPress, 

Namecheap also offers a more full-featured and paid website maker. It makes the website for you. It’s called Visual, and all the work you have to do is answer a few of its questions, pick a color scheme, et cetera, and, bing-bam-boom, there’s your website and from there on out, you can edit your site to your heart’s content, really allowing you to make a credible-looking website really quickly. 

Overall, Namecheap review is highly user-friendly. It wants to cater to both veterans and newbies, and, I must say, succeed. With a clean dashboard and cPanel, this provider removed all challenges from every hosting-related process. The website builder is also very simple and intuitive to the point that it’s a bit restrained and outdated. 

Namecheap Design features 

offer accessible App Market, free Logo Maker, free Font Generator, a paid offer for Business Cards, and an advanced feature in Image Creation, Stencil. Take the logo maker, for example. In this realm, there isn’t a comparison. 

You’re supposed to select your font choice and colouring, followed by picking an icon, and voila, there’s your logo. The choices are very generic, but that’s what you get from a free tool, after all. Actually, very few “logo makers” even allow you to download the files if you don’t pay a good price. The font generator comes to be a pretty handy tool that makes the custom font in the design layout and consistency between the digital and print realms appear perfect.

Another design feature you’ll find in Namecheap review is Stencil. Create your free account and save up to 10 free images per month. And with a Pro plan, you may access their library with over 5 million royalty-free photos, over 3 million premium icons and graphics, and over 1350 premium templates to get the style that’s the best fit your brand. It is very good for social images, arresting ads, and vibrant graphics in minutes.

On the other hand, the business card maker isn’t free at all. You’ll have to pay $18.88 for 100 business cards. It’s not that expensive, but neither will it look like it’s made by a professional designer after all.

You should do about the same thing you do when you’re designing a logo. There are a few pre-designed templates and you can play with a few elements so as to design a business card. Oh, and the good news is that shipping is free to 50 countries across all seven continents, so there’s that.

The design features of Namecheap, which I personally used, are useful for webmasters looking to build a brand. Plus, if one doesn’t have the resources to pay a designer or is just experimenting with a few ideas, then Namecheap review can be pretty handy in that regard.

Performance — is Namecheap fast enough ?

While other reviewers do not broadly approve of the performance of Namecheap review, our team put it to test and here is what we found out. A lot of performance-oriented tests were drawn on a fully built site to check the reliability, speed, and traffic handling abilities of Namecheap review. To do all this, we performed the test over a two-week period throughout a page performance monitoring tool—GTMetrix. Continue reading to find all the results.

Uptime and response time statistics provided by Namecheap

When reporting their uptime, Namecheap has had 16 outages for a total of 31 minutes of downtime over the test period; therefore, Namecheap got its lowest-ever uptime tag at 99.82%.

Such uptime is under 100% and far below average, given Namecheap’s SLA uptime guarantee.

Then, if the customer service agreed that there was a downtime, according to the terms and conditions of Namecheap, You can gain up to one month of web hosting free.

Now regarding response time, GTMetrix has shown an average of 1.05 seconds. As the result of Namecheap review, this time is not the absolute best to receive, taking into account the average shared hosting market, which is resting somewhere around 600ms. For example, providers like Hostinger have almost two times smaller average—just 511ms. Bluehost crosses the level of 361ms. So for sure, there are more reliable providers considering this aspect of performance.

Namecheap Speed

Servers are located in the US, UK, and Netherlands. Together with the research, during the tests, I hosted the site in the US data centre. So there should be no surprise that the best results weren’t in the US. The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) was 912 ms.

The hosting market definitely has seen better days, but this is not the worst either. For example, Hostinger reported an LCP of 479ms, securing even better performance for people all around the world. Meanwhile, the LCP performance metric for Bluehost was way worse than even Namecheap’s, at a whopping 920ms. So one could say that the performance of Namecheap is average.

LCP Test  Benchmark Like any other performance test, we also benchmarked Namecheap’s LCP with GTMetrix. Naturally, the further we went from the origin server, the more the LCP upticked. In the UK, the LCP was a whopping 1.4 seconds, while India shot up to 2.1 seconds. As a result, the results from other locations are not surprising and are very much expected.

Why is LCP important? It is because it is one of these ranking—discretionary measures which Google takes upon its undertaking about the action of a website for ranking that website on the search result page. In short, if the time is under 2.5 seconds, your chances of ranking are higher. At least, these chances won’t be lost.

So if you see all the brave points from their dashboard, Namecheap review rules. Not top-of-the-ladder scores, but still.

Now You’ll Know

Namecheap review has 3 data center locations: US, EU (Amsterdam), and UK only — so you can decide what you want according to the whereabouts of your users. However, if you want your website to be hosted in the UK or EU, then Namecheap has an additional charge of $1.00/month.

When measured on a fully developed website, LCP was 2.3 s, which is pretty much on the borderline—a tight fit—for reaching the recommended value of 2.5 s.

With a fully built website, priority should be on more than just the LCP. In this case, the Fully Loaded Time: 2.7 seconds. To cut to the point, this can budge more than that. Visiting the site, one does not actually feel the tiny difference in loading spaced between 1 and 2.5 seconds. But actually, everything above 3 seconds does register in the bounce-off rates.

Remember that although 2.7 isn’t his choice for a fully loaded time, it’s neither disastrous. You shouldn’t have much trouble with the LCP either if the data center is really near your audience.

Related Articles

Namecheap SLA Testing

Okay, we’ve sent 50 virtual visitors to our site. In essence, there is quite a good number—about 50 of them—on the website simultaneously, sending more than one request to it. This places pressure on it that may slow it down or even completely overload the server.

And it appears that the 50 visitors were just a tiny bit too much for Namecheap. While the response time (blue line) again was fine, way too many requests have not completed properly. Quite precisely: 440, according to the red line.

While 50 visitors didn’t work out, I was curious to know how many Namecheap can handle. So we just decreased the number of visitors by five and ran the check again until we were able to.

They gave us 30 visitor passes in the initial pass.

That’s still quite a sizeable number—30. Not that bad at all. That’s some quite decent traffic if your site is getting 30 visitors for each minute of a month. Well, that would have to be a quite popular local blog or small-business website for that kind of steady traffic.

Although I have to note: while Namecheap review passed the test, there are still 83 requests that have failed, and to be honest, at the end, the response time is getting a bit crazy. It might mean that this is just about the maximum of pressure the provider can handle.

On the whole, Namecheap review isn’t very good in terms of performance. What’s even sadder is that this provider used to assure 100% uptime and maintain a mere 99.82%. If it assured 99.9%, then, actually, we wouldn’t be that irritated. We didn’t like the arrogance out here. The loading speed also left much to be desired, let alone the maximum handled traffic on the site—nothing to get awed over.

NameCheap Security

Namecheap review is hosting safe. The company has incorporated several safety measures to protect its users. Some of the steps the company has taken to ensure user safety include:

Activate free Positive SSL with one click — I did so in seconds, making the offering just perfect, especially when you are in a hurry to have your site up and running.

WHOIS Domain Privacy Protection: available for free for all clients who are registering a domain name with Namecheap review. It protects your private life from spam, identity theft, and unwanted solicitation.

DDoS Protection – Basic Layer 3/4 DDoS Mitigation.htt Through the Supersonic CDN. FREE but you have to TURN IT ON yourself.

Web Application Firewall: NameCheap offers the basic ModSecurity traffic filter. For enhanced capabilities, customers can purchase the advanced Web Application Firewall of the paid version of Supersonic CDN.

The stellar plan gives 2 weekly backups, though there is no provision for a daily one. Stellar Plus and Stellar Business: daily automatic backups for pieces of stuff. Combined, you have 6 daily, 3 weekly, and 11 monthly backups. One can decide to use any.

Two-step verification – Namecheap review offers the potential to use U2F or TOTP for the purposes of a two-step verifications process. The first of these uses USB or NFC devices; the latter makes a pick among Google Authenticator, Authy, LastPass Authenticator, among others.

SiteLock: This is an additional offer from Namecheap review, which includes scans for malware and other potential threats. It comes with two plans: the Protect plan with 2GB of website backup, and the Protect Plus with 5GB. Of course, the last one distinguishes itself additionally with vulnerability patching.

Namecheap review covers everything in respect to tight security: from backups in the event of a loss of data to DDoS protection, always secured to top quality, guaranteeing that it does not allow malicious traffic to tamper with the flow of your site.

Namecheap Domains

Namecheap review is a very affordable, fully functional domain registrar that has a great number of top-level domains: .com, .net, .org, country-code, and specialty TLDs like .tech, .shop, and .photography. These special TLDs let people and businesses have an expanded possibility to generate special and relevant web addresses that will increase their presence on the internet.

Furthermore, in the domain of privacy, Namecheap review doesn’t compromise on meeting user needs. They bundle free WHOIS privacy protection with most domain registrations. Like this service, it replaces the personal information of the registrant with proxy details so as not to reveal one’s identity to the public and avoid likely spamming or other undesirable contacts.

Namecheap customer support

	Namecheap
24/7 live chat	✅
Email	✅
Ticketing system	✅
Phone line	❌
Knowledge base	✅

Namecheap has several customer support options that border on professionalism, swiftness, and efficiency. First, in case you need quick help, you may want to use the 24/7 live chat or ticketing system. No phone or email support is available, but the round-the-clock live chat makes up for that.

ModUNK Speaking of the live chat, I found that it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes for agents to respond. I tried contacting Namecheap review regarding our issue when trying to activate the SSL certificate. The agent was very helpful and jumped to solve the problem right away. He kept us informed on what the issue was and what he was doing to fix it.

So, our experience with the customer support was quite good. The agent was very kind and helpful; the problem got resolved in a very short period of time.

Together with the online chat feature, Namecheap has a pretty detailed knowledge base. There, I could find articles and guides, many of them including step-by-step instructions, which is very useful for beginners.

Summarizing, I would like to note that the customer support of Namecheap is excellent. Live Chat was a nice and professional experience, and the Knowledge Base contained enough information for beginners.

Namecheap review – the final verdict

RESULT Reviewing through this, Namecheap review is a good hosting service, with its pluses and areas for improvement. The prices are very low, but, on the downside, the subscriptions aren’t as stuffed with resources as, let’s say, Hostinger. Namecheap review offers great security measures, but it lacks storage and has a low amount of websites allowed in the cheapest plan while offering terrible performance. Here is a summary of all the findings:

Feature	3.6★★★★☆	Low-cost hosting that is easy to use.
Pricing	★★★★☆	The best shared hosting offer from Hostinger is going for $1.61/month for a 2-year subscription. The offered plans are pretty much inclusive, considering the amount you are paying for. However, renewal fees will double.
Ease of Use	★★★★☆	Namecheap uses a very basic cPanel. While it lacks a private skin, it is actually intuitive and functional. The Web Builder works well and is also very intuitive; it just gets quite confining.
Performance	★★★☆☆	Where it fails really miserably is performance. An uptime of 99.82% is way below its 100% guarantee, and the average response time of 1.05s really speaks for itself. The loading speed wasn’t awesome either but, on the brighter side, relatively big traffic was handled efficiently by Namecheap.
Security	★★★☆☆	It comes with all the security bells and whistles expected: SSL certificates, DDoS protection, backups, and domain privacy. However, definitely sub-basic. Backups from the Stellar plan are slightly odd in it does not say it will actually take them. Stellar Plus and Stellar Business both come with guaranteed auto-backups.
Support	★★★★☆	Their customer support is near impeccable. It offers live chat and a ticketing system, but both are fast and efficient. There is a very informative knowledge base, and a resource center will teach you almost everything on online presence.

Who do I recommend Namecheap to, therefore?

We would recommend using Namecheap review to host only a small personal blog and not one that you intend to monetize. It may further be good for testing the ins and outs of website creation skills. It is cost-friendly and easy for personal stuff; however, its performance drags behind. Use it for cheap domains, which is all the provider is really good at.

But what if you are running a lot of high-traffic sites, or maybe an e-commerce with maximum uptime and top-of-the-line performance—then, sorry, but yes, Namecheap doesn’t cut the mustard. The performance just doesn’t cut it, and its focus on affordability and simplicity doesn’t mesh with the kind of scalability and robustness needed in business-critical operations.

Namecheap – FAQ’s

What does Namecheap do

Namecheap review offers domain name services by registering, transferring, and renewing domain names. It, therefore, offers extra features like user protection and privacy.

What are the cons of Namecheap?

Some in the world are criticising Namecheap review for their website performance and options of customer support, saying there is no phone support at all, and email help is very limited; others argue about the site’s layout per se or about further sale strategies. They do not make it as user-friendly or appealing as compared to other hosting companies.

Can Namecheap be trusted?

Yes, we can trust Namecheap review in the domain registration and web hosting industry. Well, it substituted confusing prices and took care of client privacy with services like “WhoisGuard,” so the domain has become quite pointed with. Individual experiences may vary, however, just like with many other service providers.

Is Namecheap an affiliate of GoDaddy?

Namecheap and GoDaddy both are independent players in the domain and web hosting business. Namecheap review is reselling the domains through the Afternic network that now belongs to GoDaddy. This, however, would not mean that the either of them is owned by GoDaddy or interlinked as subsidiaries of the same company. They remain completely independent and run their own services in the industry.

Is Namecheap any good?

To name a few, Namecheap has, on the positive side, been called a very cheap domain registration service provider, and it is rather commendable for a user-friendly interface on its services. It features transparent pricing and goodies like WhoisGuard for privacy protection. But, of course, preferences are usually subjective, so it might be worth it after all to look up some more recent reviews and possibly ratings if you’re still comparing and if nothing seems final.

Where are you located, Namecheap?

Namecheap is a private US-based business unit headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. It operates in its data centre through locations in the US, EU, and the UK. Is Namecheap secure? Yes, it’s safe, and it comes with many security features inbuilt with their plans. You can always buy more from the service provider’s app store. Why is Namecheap so cheap? Namecheap is cost-saving due to the large customer base, letting it be flexible with prices, although the core service performance is poor and many resources are less in number.

Why is Namecheap so cheap?

Namecheap is cheap because it has a huge customer base, allowing them to be more flexible with prices. However, the service also offers poor performance and limited resources.